[lg policy] It's an English-Speaking World Out There

Wed Apr 21 16:44:03 UTC 2010

>>From the _Vancouver Sun_ (_via_ Twitter), a general think-piece, triggered 
by the legislation currently under consideration in Canada under which 
potential Supreme Court Justices would only be eligible for selection if 
they already spoke both English and French beforehand. It is the opinion of 
the author of the piece that, while language-learning is valuable, this 
kind of legislation is foolish because it would have stopped at least one 
prominent Justice from being appointed; and he points out his own 
experiences of the dominance of English even in contexts where he would 
have expected it not to dominate.

Damien

http://www.vancouversun.com/opinion/English+speaking+world+there/2933044/story.html

It's an English-speaking world out there

By Dan Gardner, Canwest News Service April 21, 2010

Had a bill currently before the Senate been passed in 1989, Beverley 
McLachlin would not be on the Supreme Court. Photograph by: Reuters, 
Canwest News Service

With the reader's indulgence, I'd like to tell a story that may be of 
interest to those concerned by a bill -- now before the Senate -- that 
would bar anyone who is not fully fluent in French and English from being 
appointed to the Supreme Court.

Longer ago than I care to remember, I was a graduate student of history. My 
focus was modern Germany, and so I tried to learn German.

But this was in Toronto and studying German in Toronto is like studying 
glaciation in Las Vegas. Books, recordings and classes can only take you so 
far. To get beyond the basics, you have to live the language.

So I scraped together every penny I had, flew to Germany, took a train to a 
gorgeous little town in the Rhineland, and enrolled in a Goethe Institute 
language school. Not even bankruptcy would stop me. I was serious about 
learning. I would learn, damn it.

I did not learn.

On leaving the plane, I immediately discovered Germans think English is 
cool and modern, and so English routinely appears in advertising. Not only 
catchphrases. Whole blocks of text. All English.

I also discovered that most Germans can speak English well. Too well. 
Whenever I spoke to a German, in any setting, they would smile politely as 
I struggled to the end of the sentence. Then they would respond. In 
English. Shopkeepers, waiters, and ticket clerks would become annoyed -- 
politely annoyed, mind you -- if I persisted in German. They were at work 
and teaching foreigners wasn't their job.

It didn't get much better at the Goethe Institute because German was heard 
only in the classrooms. I vividly recall going out the first night with 
some other students. There was a Czech, a Japanese, a Pole, a Norwegian, a 
Swede, and a Spaniard. We all spoke at least a little German, we were all 
there to learn German, and we were drinking German beer. And so, naturally, 
the entire conversation was in English.

Of course, there was still lots of German to encounter and lots of Germans 
to speak to -- even if I annoyed them -- and if I had stayed for six months 
or a year, I would have progressed. But I was broke. So back I went to 
Canada and my books, recordings and classes. I gave up on German when I 
stopped studying history. Inevitably, my limited skills melted away. Today, 
I struggle with the headlines on the website of Der Spiegel.

Why do I tell this tale of woe? Because whenever I write about bilingualism 
and the difficulty a native English-speaker has learning another language, 
I get e-mail from bilingual francophones saying -- in English, bien sur -- 
that they resent "Anglo whining." Just learn French, damn it! One 
Montrealer called me a lazy bigot.

A bigot? Sure, whatever. But "lazy?" That is offensive.

The simple reality is that a native English-speaker attempting to learn 
another language is seldom in the same position as a native Frenchspeaker 
doing the same. In a fair world, they would be. But that's not the world we 
live in. We live in a world where pop culture is overwhelmingly English, a 
world where Hollywood movies play in English on Dutch TV with Dutch 
subtitles, which is fabulous if you're a Dutch person learning English, but 
a disaster for the English-speaker in Amsterdam to learn Dutch.

The Finnish company Nokia recently asked me to lecture in Munich. They 
didn't ask me to speak in German, happily. In fact, they never mentioned 
language at all. Even though the audience came from all over Europe, the 
Middle East, and Asia, it was a given that all business would be conducted 
in English. This is the norm. I've lectured in five countries on two 
continents and the only time language is ever mentioned is when I speak in 
Ottawa to the civil service. That's just the way the world is. Everyone 
knows it. But the zealots pushing bilingualism to extreme lengths won't 
acknowledge it.

Instead, they shrug. Sure it's hard for adult anglophones to become 
bilingual, Graham Fraser, the official languages commissioner, says. But 
lots do. Just look at Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, "born in Pincher 
Creek, Alta." Fraser neglected to mention that McLachlin did not learn 
French in Pincher Creek. She studied some French in university. And, after 
she was appointed to the federal bench, she took courses offered to federal 
judges. "At the time of her appointment to the Supreme Court of Canada," I 
was informed by her office, "she had good reading French, and moderate oral 
French. She continued to study French once she was appointed to the Court, 
taking lessons regularly for several years before her appointment as chief 
justice, as well as working in French." Today she handles French without 
the assistance of translators.

Notice that the chief justice became fully fluent in French only when she 
had the opportunity to live the language, an opportunity denied most 
anglophones living in a unilingual environment, which is to say, most 
people in the country. And please note that the description of the chief 
justice's fluency at the time of her appointment to the Supreme Court 
suggests she was not capable of doing the full gamut of judicial work in 
French without the assistance of a translator. That's enormously 
significant.

It means that if the bill now before the Senate had been in force at the 
time, Beverley McLachlin -- indisputably one of the finest jurists in this 
country's history -- would have been disqualified from sitting on the 
Supreme Court.

It's time for the chamber of sober second thought to live up to its billing 
and stop this foolishness. © Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

-- 
Damien Hall

University of York
Department of Language and Linguistic Science
Heslington
YORK
YO10 5DD
UK

Tel. (office) +44 (0)1904 432665
     (mobile) +44 (0)771 853 5634
Fax  +44 (0)1904 432673

http://www.york.ac.uk/res/aiseb

http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/lang/people/pages/hall.htm

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